GERTRUDE NASON (1890 1965) Trekking Down Bleeker Street

Sale 2678 - Lot 61

Price Realized: $ 1,625

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500

GERTRUDE NASON (1890-1965)
Trekking Down Bleeker Street.

Oil on canvas, circa 1932. 765x785 mm; 30x31 inches. Signed lower right.

Provenance
David Barnet Gallery, Milwaukee (label).
Sotheby's Arcade, New York, September 9, 1993, lot 335A.
Collection of Leonard Stark, Chicago.
Freeman's | Hindman, Chicago, May 3, 2021, lot 1.
Private collection, Massachusetts.

Exhibited
"American Scene Painting," Catherine G. Murphy Gallery, The College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota, February 4-March 3, 1995 (label).

Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

Gertrude Nason, her sister Kathryn, and her brother Thomas each grew up to be artists. They were raised in Everett, Massachusetts, and Nason attended the Massachusetts School of Art in Boston and the Boston Museum School of Fine Art, where she studied under Edmund Tarbell. Nason established a studio in Boston and worked for the city's schools as an art supervisor.

After her marriage to fellow artist William H. Donahue, she lived and worked in New York and spent her summers in Lyme, Connecticut, often with her siblings. Nason was active in the Lyme Art Association and exhibited with the group, which included Guy C. Wiggins. In these Lyme exhibitions, it was evident that Nason was experimenting with her style and technique, as a writer for the Christian Science Monitor noted on August 9, 1930 in their review of the Lyme Art Association exhibition, "Gertrude Nason is evidently searching for truthful expression. Her lapses into different techniques and different palettes are interesting as they divulge the various stages through which this artist passes." In 1932, Nason had used another summer in Lyme to experiment further, a writer for the New Haven Register called Nason an "extreme modernist" in their review of the 30th Annual Exhibition of Lyme artists; The New York Sun called her work "plainly radical". Nason continued to show her broad range of styles with the group for the rest of her career.

By the 1930's, Nason had already exhibited her work at prominent institutions such as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia and the National Academy of Design, New York. She was a member of the Pen and Brush Club, Brooklyn Society of Modern Art, the Creative Arts Association, the New York Society of Women Artists, and the National Association of Women Artists.